Post 53 - May 3, 2020
Day 53…
It was glorious to be out in the day yesterday.
New York experienced a perfect spring day weather-wise - 72F/22C, blue skies with a scattering of clouds.
It was the first day when we could really be outside without a jacket or a hoodie.
So, I masked-up, pocketed some hand sanitizer, and took a long walk.
Broadway runs like an artery down through the center of Manhattan.
It runs through all manner of neighborhoods - high income, low income, residential, business.
It runs past Columbia University on the Upper West Side and art galleries downtown in SoHo and in midtown it goes right through the heart of Times Square.
You get to experience almost all of New York when you walk on Broadway.
During the first couple of weeks of the pandemic, nobody at all was out on the streets.
The weather wasn’t all that great and people were truly terrified.
Gradually, over these last few weeks, that terror seems to have lessened.
The overwhelming experience of standing completely alone in the center of Times Square is not happening anymore.
People are starting to come back out.
As I walked downtown yesterday, I watched the people who were out there walking with me.
For the first time since I’ve walked through the city since the pandemic started, an overwhelming majority of my fellow New Yorkers seemed to be observing the health guidelines that have been recommended.
I would say that 90-95% of the people who were out on the street were wearing masks and staying away from each other.
Most of us now seem to have developed he instinct to veer away from each other without thought.
Even people on cell phones or who are otherwise distracted, veer.
The people who don’t do this, really stand out.
The point of all of this social distancing and mask-wearing has never been to “cure” COVID-19.
There is no cure for the virus.
The point of all of this has been to flatten the curve.
What does that really mean?
Simply, what it means is that we have been trying to avoid everyone getting sick at the same time and overwhelming the hospital system.
There are only so many ventilators and other equipment available to deal with people who get into real trouble with it.
People are going to get sick with this virus.
At the moment, there is no way to avoid it.
What we have done by instituting these stay-at-home orders is to prolong the period over which people become exposed.
Rather than everyone getting exposed at the same time, they are getting exposed over weeks.
Because of this, we have actually been able to keep up with the demand for hospitalization that has happened.
The projections that were initially provided by the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) indicated that the way the virus was spreading, hospitals were going to be inundated with cases and not have enough of anything to handle it.
Hence, the mad scramble to look for ventilators and all of the political in-fighting that resulted.
What the shutdowns and social distancing have accomplished has been to lessen the amount of people in New York who are showing up to the hospital at any one time.
Happily, so far, we haven’t needed all of those ventilators.
We know that now.
We didn’t know that THEN.
As we open back up, more people are going to get sick.
That’s unavoidable.
The reason that we need to have some coordination around the reopening is to make sure that these new people contracting the virus, don’t all get sick at the same time.
That’s what happened in Italy.
So many people got sick at the same time, that doctors had to choose which patients to help and which patients to let die.
We haven’t done a lot of things correctly here, but it seems that we did manage to avoid that.
SO FAR, in New York, people who have needed to be on a ventilator got on a ventilator.
Where we have been completely overwhelmed is on the other end of this in terms of being able to deal with the bodies of the dead - hence the temporary morgues fashioned from refrigeration trucks - but we seem to have kept up with the front end, where it matters.
That’s good.
Regardless, nothing has changed with the virus.
It is still there.
It is going to continue to circulate.
Flattening the curve means that people are going to get sick over a longer period of time.
If a thousand people get sick on one day, that overwhelms a hospital.
If that same thousand people get sick over the course of a month or two, then the hospital can keep up and many more of them will survive.
Either way, those thousand people are going to get sick.
My walk yesterday took me down Broadway to Times Square.
All of the stores that don’t carry groceries or household goods are still closed.
Most restaurants and bars are closed.
Those that are open are only open for take-out or delivery.
Outside some of those places that are open, people are standing in an orderly line, 6 feet apart.
There are some places, though, where that isn’t happening.
People are gathered in a small crowd by the door, much closer together than six feet and not everyone is wearing a mask.
Walking down the sidewalk, you have to go into the street itself to get around them if you want to keep your distance.
I got to Times Square, which is still not crowded in pre-COVID terms, but has more people there than have been there in weeks past.
The Naked Cowboy is back.
Despite the fact that he is an ardent admirer of the President, he was wearing a mask.
I took it all in from a distance.
From there, I walked over to 5th Avenue and headed back uptown alternating between 5th and Madison.
In midtown there are large stretches of these streets that are non-residential. They are all lined with “non-essential” retail stores that remain closed.
Because of that, there are far fewer people walking along them than there are on streets like Broadway that are also residential.
Madison Avenue, in particular, still feels abandoned in the way that all of New York did during those first few weeks.
From there, I went into the Park.
Central Park was overwhelmed with people.
The Great Lawn was actually crowded.
Yes, there were plenty of people in the Park who wore masks and kept to themselves, respecting social distancing, but there were also plenty of people who were not.
Many large groups were having picnics, playing games.
Some had masks, some didn’t.
Some had masks on but wore them pointlessly under their chins.
For the first few years of the AIDS epidemic, people thought that it was just a gay disease. Newspapers at the time called it the “Gay Plague”.
People who weren’t gay thought that they were immune and ignored safe-sex guidelines.
They weren’t immune.
There is a perception that only old people get the coronavirus.
That’s not true.
Older people may be more susceptible to it, but it’s not just older people who are dying.
Younger people don’t just carry it, they also die from it.
They are susceptible to developing blood clots that can cause them to have strokes.
All through Central Park, there are signs, in red, that say, “Keep this far apart” with a six-foot arrow underneath.
In Central Park, yesterday, there were crowds of people clumped together right in front of the signs.
COVID-19 is here and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
Cases in New York are going down not because it is disappearing, but because by staying away from each other we are making it harder for it to travel among us.
Wearing masks, we are putting a fence between us and it.
Not a wall - a FENCE.
Masks can stop us from spreading a lot of the virus but not ALL of it.
I live in a building with a large number of fellow residents who are in the most “at risk” category.
I don’t want to lose a single one of them.
To help keep that from happening, I am choosing to wear a mask and stay away from everyone except my husband.
I wonder how many of those people who are choosing not to do that are leaning out of their windows at 7pm every night and applauding our frontline healthcare workers.
Not wearing a mask and gathering together is only going to help the virus spread.
If the virus starts spreading again, there is a very real chance that our numbers will start going back up.
We could re-overwhelm the hospitals and put those very health care workers that we are applauding into very real danger.
As we get more and more beautiful warm days, we are all going to want to go outside.
And we should.
Absolutely go out and get some exercise and fresh air.
Nobody wants to stop you from doing that.
But please let’s do whatever we can, however imperfect it might be, to take care of each other.
The warmer the weather the more wearing a mask is going to be annoying.
But is it really more annoying to have a sweaty chin than it is to infect your neighbor?
If you choose not to wear a mask and keep your distance, that is absolutely your choice.
We do not live under an authoritarian regime (yet).
Choosing not to, however, seems to have some potential consequences.
Serious consequences.
We don’t nearly have all of the information that we need yet, but we have some.
So, please, make that choice wisely and really look at why that is what you are choosing.
Go outside into the glorious sunshine and look at your neighbors.
Look at your masked neighbors sitting on their own who are inconveniencing themselves to try and protect you.
Look at them and then make your choice.